Gambling.com Group Limited (NASDAQ:GAMB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeff Stantial: Hey, great. Good afternoon, Charles, Elias. Thanks for taking our questions. Starting off here, performance in UK and Ireland during the quarter, Charles, you talked to a bit of a deceleration after I think a seven consecutive healthy quarters. It seems to me, as you mentioned, it’s mostly just a function of tough comps, but just to be crystal clear, is there anything else worth commenting on, driving this deceleration, whether that’s in fact from some of the regulatory headwinds, your customers have called out, [indiscernible] and market share trend, anything else are just purely tough comps. Any thoughts there would be appreciated?

Charles Gillespie: Yeah. Specific to our business and some of our individual products, our search performance in the last couple of months has been merely great, but not phenomenal or excellent as it had been. There’s been a kind of continuous stream of Google updates which have put a little bit of volatility into the search engine results pages. Happy to report, however, that the last check-in we had just today with the search teams is that we were back to kind of peak performance and expect to be in a good place for Q4. So, as you look at our Q3 UK and Ireland performance, it was, I know there’s been some signals from some of the other operators that that market has been a bit weak in terms of like sports betting results but as a reminder our business in the UK and Ireland is predominantly driven by casino and it was a very marginal under performance for a couple of months which held it back, which we think is behind us.

Jeff Stantial: Okay. That’s a great statement. And then for my follow-up, I wanted to drill into one of the comments you made towards the end of the prepared remarks. I think you mentioned having access to capital should you opt to pursue a larger transaction. Can you frame out for us what that landscape looks like? It seems to me there are few acquisitions within your core business model potentially out there that would necessitate a capital raise but cares if you could just expand upon that landscape that opportunity what you see if the addressable set that that could require incremental capital? Thanks.

Charles Gillespie: Yeah. I obviously can’t talk about any specific M&A situation, but the message Elias and I want to get out to everybody is that we remain very busy evaluating these opportunities. Just because we haven’t announced anything in two years doesn’t mean we’re not tirelessly working in the background on some fairly interesting stuff and that we’re not afraid of pursuing a transaction that would require a little bit of additional capital or maybe a medium amount of additional capital. Kind of all things are on the table and those conversations are going, we’re having more interesting conversations than we were six months ago and we remain very busy with all that.

Jeff Stantial: Okay, guys. That’s helpful. Thanks, Charles. Great work, guys.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.

Clark Lampen: Thanks a lot. Good evening. Charles, I just want to make sure I heard I guess some of the comments, in response to the last question sort of properly. It sounds like I guess some of the deceleration was more transient than anything and I think the way you framed it was great but maybe not phenomenal performance as a result of adjusting to ALGO (ph) changes. Was that, I guess, sort of the primary factor I heard right in sort of the down-tick in performance and that it’s going to, maybe we should expect it to rebound in 4Q and going forward?

Charles Gillespie: That’s right, Clark. Even if, — even as the search performance moves, back up into the phenomenal category, the comps are nevertheless more and more difficult as of course we’ve grown substantially in the UK and Ireland over the past seven quarters. So that effect is still there but we do — you’re right. The slide under performance we view as transitory, not anything to do with the market at large, and we are positive — we have a positive perspective moving forward.

Clark Lampen: Okay. That’s helpful. If we were to think maybe, I guess, about the sort of market at large in the U.S, have you guys seen any sort of bifurcation in either trend or performance. If we were to think about it sort of broken down between, say, casino versus sports or between maybe as a different way of looking at it, the two sort of big operators versus the rest of the market. Is either sort of vertical or cohort of customers exhibiting greater strength or outperforming the other in terms of acquisition behavior at the moment?

Charles Gillespie: I don’t think there’s any kind of broad trends across those segments to be picked up on. But what we have seen with this business over many years is, if you bucket the operators off into kind of tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, with kind of fan dual DraftKings in the U.S. in tier 1, [indiscernible] MGM tier 2, tier 3 everybody else. It’s the tier 2 and tier 3 guys that want to be tier 1 and tier 2 that are our best customers. By definition they’re fighting to take market share and they want to move up the ladder. So they need as much help as they can get and they know performance marketing is a sure thing in terms of moving up that ladder.

Clark Lampen: Thanks very much.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please proceed with your question.

Chad Beynon: Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to drill back into the media partnership success that you outlined for the third quarter and more importantly for the fourth quarter and beyond. Is this just kind of a factor of higher conversion rates or anything else? And can you just talk about how this product can kind of evolve given that it’s pretty early and maybe the seasonality of it if a lot of it comes at the very beginning of the NFL season or if it can continue as you continue to publish content. Thanks.